Name that Ware, July 2019

The ware for July 2019 is shown below.

ISA, I say! Back in the day when all it took was a couple 7400 series chips to talk to a computer…now we use a small computer just to properly negotiate power before talking for real over standards like USB-C.

Thanks to Nava for contributing this ware, found at Akihabalast, “Akihabara final waste disposal site!”.

Opto-Isolated 16 channel I/O board presumably used for some form of industrial automation?

Some notes:
– the connector is a chunky 37 pins – that’s a seriously large cable… the part number pcb37P gives an idea
– I/O address is set via the 3 dials SW1/SW2/SW3
– interrupt is configured by jumpering bottom left jumpers
– 2 of the input signals can be routed to trigger an interrupt

The sample C program on the last page of the manual is fairly minimal. Read/write directly to I/O address – no protected memory!

If I recall, the MS C compiler had a ?macro?function call? to issue INP and OUTP instructions to talk to the Intel I/O port space. With DOS as a real mode “OS”, an ordinary program could use dangerous instructions to read/write directly from/to hardware. Any real OS will immediately fault any program that does such bad things. A lot of (bad) device drivers were written to avoid this safety measure.
Also, in the Bad Old Days, some goofy programmers used the Parallel Port as a bootleg I/O device. Later versions of the hardware were bidirectional, an could actually read and write byte wide, with an extra nibble for handshake.
Today a lot of Pie boards are being sold to replace this board. The GPIO pins act like this thing did.

An impressive share! I have just forwarded this onto a co-worker who has been doing a little research on this.
And he in fact ordered mee dinbner because I discovered it for him…
lol. So alpow me to reword this…. Thank YOU for
the meal!! Butt yeah, thsnx for spending some time to talk about this matter here on your web
site.